Welcome to week #10! Thank you for understanding our cancellations last week; we will be building additional veggies into your shares for the next few weeks to make up for the loss. If you are curious about what we were all up to last week, read the “Beat The Heat!” section below 🙂

In Your Share This Week

Beets

Cilantro

Chard

Fennel

Onions

Summer Squash/Cucumbers/Eggplant

Crop Highlights

Cilantro: We harvest and distribute our cilantro (or coriander leaves) with the roots still attached. They are edible (and delicious!) and also help the cilantro store for longer in your refrigerator. You can either wrap the cilantro in a bag (damp, but not wet!), or place it in a jar of water on your counter top. While most of us at SIO love cilantro, there are a couple of farmers who think it smells/tastes like soap. If you’re similar, not to worry! Research suggests that aversion to cilantro is genetic.

Eggplant: This slender eggplant is a Japanese variety called Orient Express. We have been growing it for years and it is the only type of eggplant we decided to plant this year, because it is dependable and tasty! It has a delicate flavor and is quick cooking. Enjoy in meals with your other summery veggies.

Meet August Schwartz! This is August’s third year with us- he joined us in early 2015 as a full timer, and now works two to three days a week. The most endearing of the SIO crew, he spouts (mostly) good farm puns and other jokes all day long. His favorite farm activity is hand transplanting (a rare favorite), and the energy he puts into grunt activities like it is contagious; we all wish we worked with him more often. He also spends at least one day a week doing irrigation, his other favorite farm job. Thanks for helping keep everything alive last week!

In addition to farming, “Augdawg” does landscaping and carpentry with his friend Jay, who he met working at SIO in 2015. He is very knowledgeable about plants and enthusiastic about gardening. His greatest love in life, though, is playing ultimate frisbee! He plays offensive handler (a distributor/assister) on Rip City Ultimate, a men’s club team based out of Portland. Ultimate season is in high gear during the summer, so he often travels on the weekends for west coast/northwest tournaments. Fun to be around on and off the field, SIO wouldn’t be the same without him.

Beat The Heat!

Last week was no joke! Fortunately SIO’s management is made up of a lovely team of people, and they adjusted our work schedule accordingly: work days were cut down to 5:30am-noon, and we canceled CSA and Friday restaurant deliveries in order to save our bodies and veggies from the afternoon and Thursday’s heat. We spent early mornings harvesting delicate greens for our wholesale and Wednesday restaurant accounts, and late mornings harvesting large quantities of carrots and beets. We provided our irrigators with assistants so that we could set up pipe and run water earlier, and our managers stayed late to shut these sets off, keep our greenhouse starts alive, and process our produce in the pack-house. Thank you Brian, Jen and Jesse! I hope everyone was able to enjoy a couple of afternoon siestas as much as I did. This weeks’ low 90s feels like quite the treat.

Speaking of treats and beating the heat, check out Salt & Straw this month! They are making their Carrot Cake Batter & Hazelnut Praline ice cream with SIO carrots, and their Green Fennel & Maple (my favorite) with SIO fennel. Get it by the end of this month! Back in June they used our stored celeriac for their “Rescued Food Series” to make a delightful Celery Root & Strawberry Celery Leaf Jam ice cream. We are excited to have partnered with them now for the past three years, and look forward to future indulgences.

Enjoy this picture taken by Nate of sunrise this morning, Tuesday, August 8th 🙂